Britain’s Labour party – home of socialist ideals for six generations – is in a state of near panic at the prospect an actual socialist could emerge as its next leader.

Two months after fumbling away an election is was expected to win, Britain’s second-biggest party is in full meltdown, with a leadership vote just weeks away and two camps at war over the soul of the party.

The confrontation pits the party’s traditional, union-backed, beards-and-Birkenstocks followers against its more establishment-oriented pragmatists, who have dominated since Tony Blair gained the leadership in 1994 and moved it steadily into the political middle ground. That resulted in three consecutive majority governments. But Blair stepped down eight years ago and his most recent successor, the colourless, little-loved Ed Milliband, resigned after May’s crushing defeat. Now there’s a real possibility that veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn – a career backbencher and five-time winner of Parliament’s best beard competition — could be the next leader, vaulting the Birkenstocks crowd back into control.

Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Corbyn shocked everyone – not least his Labour colleagues – by topping three more conventional candidates in the first substantial poll of the contest, with a 17-point lead. Corbyn has represented the traditionally radical riding of Islington in North London for 30 years, viewed as a quaint but harmless relic of the past, so stuck in his ideological rut that one of his three wives left him because he refused to send their son to a better school. Even Corbyn’s admirers admit he’s poor prime ministerial material – only 5% say it matters whether he actually wins or not. In one of his first important interviews he lost his temper and began berating the interviewer, who had pressed him on his statement that Islamist extremists in Hamas and Hezbollah are “our friends.” Corbyn once declared his own ambivalence about the leadership, noting it would rob him of his ability to criticize his own party.

One of Corbyn’s three wives left him because he refused to send their son to a better school.

It would be a gross understatement to say his sudden prominence has split the party. Blair – whose ten years in power were the longest ever by a Labour prime minister – launched a full-throated attack last week, telling a Labour think tank a Corbyn victory would doom Labour to 20 years on opposition benches. He suggested said anyone whose heart was with Corbyn should “get a transplant, and declared he wouldn’t run on Corbyn’s platform to renationalize trains and power facilities even if he thought it would win.

Other Labour officials swiftly chimed in. One declared that MPs who backed Corbyn for sentimental reasons were “morons.” Another proclaimed the party was acting like “a petulant child,” blaiming voters for its defeat in May. One Labour MP wants the contest postponed, charging that Marxist radicals were using a simplified membership process – just pay $6 and you can vote – to “infiltrate” the party.

The establishment fusillade quickly drew return fire. John – now Lord – Prescott, who served a decade as Blair’s deputy prime minister, said Blair was the one who needed the transplant, charging it was his support for the Iraq invasion that ruined Labour’s standing.

AFP PHOTO / JUSTIN TALLISJUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

Indeed, since leaving 10 Downing Street, Blair has become one of the country’s most divisive figures. British media delights in chronicling his wealthy lifestyle and champagne tastes. Blair now heads a global enterprise that earns him millions of pounds a year from speeches, consulting and other ventures. He and wife Cherie have amassed an impressive portfolio in Britain’s hyper-expensive property market, including a 17th century manor house once owned by the actor Sir John Gielgud. When the Blairs’ property holdings alone were estimated at about $50 million, the former prime minister insisted his real worth was no more than $40 million.

Cleansing Labour of the taint of Blairism is an important part of Corbyn’s appeal. Supporters note he lives frugally and maintains a garden where he grows organic vegetables. They insist Blair went too far in trading moral purity for political power, culminating in the heresy of his support for George W. Bush and his Iraq adventure. Of the four leadership candidates only one identifies with Blair, and she’s running a distant fourth. Pressure is already building on her to withdraw rather than aid Corbyn by drawing votes from the others.

Britain’s political punditry is having a field day with the feud. The staunchly Tory Daily Telegraph is urging readers to join Labour, vote for Corbyn and help “destroy” the party. One columnist noted archly that, rather than regroup and rebuild for the next election, Labour “has become drunk on the lack of power.” Unidentified Labour MPs are said to be planning a revolt should Corbyn triumph, noting that the last time Labour chose a leader from the hard left was in the 1980s, when the other-worldly Michael Foot was pummelled by Margaret Thatcher. Corbyn bears a certain earnest resemblance to Foot: fellow Labour veteran “Red Ken” Livingstone, asked by The Times to share a humourous moment from the 40 years he’s known Corbyn, said he couldn’t think of any.

Whether there’s a lesson in this for Canada’s “progressives” is an open question. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is now engaged in a mission to shift the party out of its comfy confines on the left edge of the political spectrum, just as Blair did two decades ago. So far it has brought him within striking distance of becoming prime minister. But he may want to be wary of disenchanting too many of the party’s true believers, who have never seen power as an adequate alternative for moral rectitude and the opportunity to lecture lesser beings. He may need them again one day.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Why do so many people dislike Tony Blair?

The Brits are usually nice to their former prime ministers, however glad they may have been to turf them out of office. Harold Wilson, James Callaghan Margaret Thatcher, John Major, even Gordon Brown became tolerated, maybe revered with the passage of time.

Not so Blair, the architect of New Labour. He remains universally reviled at home, where his missteps are seized on gleefully. People point to his love of money, his cosying-up to repressive regimes and his preachiness as reasons for their dislike. Not for nothing has the satirical magazine Private Eye christened him The Vicar of St. Albans.

Brits also continue to feel they were lied to over Iraq — those infamous, nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. A YouGov poll in 2013 found almost half those polled considered him a war criminal. Then there are the persistent rumours of an affair with Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s then-wife (they divorced last year).

It’s partly because Blair can’t — or won’t — shut up, with rare exceptions. Most recently, he hit the headlines for comments on the party he once headed and its current leader, Ed Miliband, reports Peter Dominiczak at The Daily Telegraph.

Tony Blair has been forced to insist that he “fully supports” Ed Miliband after making a series of comments in which he suggested that the Labour leader is on course to lose the election.

The former prime minister has now said he “expects a Labour victory” in May’s general election.

His clarification came less than 24 hours after the publication of a damning interview in The Economist magazine in which Mr. Blair said that Mr. Miliband will not win the general election because he has veered too far to the left and has alienated British businesses

The Observer‘s Andrew Rawnsley believes in this case Blair was attacked for being right — Labour is unelectable, at present.

About some things, Tony Blair might not be the ideal person to approach for advice, especially at the fee level he charges. How to conduct wars in the Middle East. How to control your chancellor. How to burnish your post prime-ministerial reputation. But on one subject he has an excellent claim to be an expert. When it comes to how to win power, you’d think contemporary leaders might think the former prime minister worth paying a little heed to.

In a profile in Vanity Fair magazine, Sarah Ellison asks how the former PM reconciles his work for dubious regimes and big corporations with his aspirations to global leadership. (The answer seems to be: He is — and was — right about everything.)

Blair sees himself as pioneering something new: being the first prime minister who behaves like an American-style ex-president. In his pursuit of this role he has continued to weigh in on topics such as global terrorism and Iraqi politics. He has established a variety of philanthropic foundations. And, like Bill Clinton, he has set out to make some money, in his case aggressively pursuing business deals with autocratic governments around the world. Blair’s view of this is that one must be pragmatic—better to engage with unsavoury regimes, and maybe improve them a little, than not to do so at all. Better to take whatever money you can get with one hand, as long as you do good with the other. If you believe his motivations are pure, then he is trying to save the world by playing the role of a geopolitical Robin Hood.

It is an understatement to say that not everyone believes his motivations are pure. One man who does, however, is Tony Blair.

Rick Cohen in the Non Profit Quarterly suggests Blair may face further problems as a result of the U.S. Senate report on torture.

The mix of donors has a Bill Clinton-type of feel, except Clinton has never faced calls that he be tried as a war criminal, as Blair is now facing due to the release of the CIA torture report in the United States. Blair has already been dealing with the investigations (the Chilcot inquiries) by the British government over his handling of the Iraq invasion. Now Blair may have to answer questions about what he knew and when he knew it concerning the torture practices revealed by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s committee.

In The Economist interview, Anne McElvoy had the temerity to ask about Ms. Deng.

Mr. Blair roundly denies any impropriety. Asked whether he was (at least) careless about his reputation, he says calmly that it is “not something I will ever talk about — I haven’t and I won’t,” and then bangs his coffee cup so loudly into its saucer that it spills and everyone in the room jumps. But did he find himself in a tangle over his friendship with Ms. Deng? A large, dark pool of sweat has suddenly appeared under his armpit, spreading across an expensive blue shirt. Even Mr. Blair’s close friends acknowledge that the saga damaged him — not least financially, since Mr. Murdoch stopped contributing to Mr. Blair’s faith foundation and cut him off from other friendly donors in America.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/tony-blair-the-man-brits-love-to-hate-partly-because-he-wont-shut-up/feed0std52765071‘You are all idiots, I am English!’ Man in public gallery hurls marbles at British MPs during sessionhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/you-are-all-idiots-i-am-english-man-in-public-gallery-hurls-marbles-at-british-mps-during-session
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/you-are-all-idiots-i-am-english-man-in-public-gallery-hurls-marbles-at-british-mps-during-session#commentsWed, 22 Oct 2014 13:54:01 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=532883

LONDON — A major security breach occurred in the House of Commons when a man in the public gallery hurled marbles at MPs from the public gallery.

The man stood up and shouted, while the marbles are understood to have damaged the glass screen in the gallery.
Members of the public were detained in the public gallery while the man, who had different coloured eyes, was detained by police officers.

When questioned by the Telegraph the man swore and declined to answer. Asked what his protest was about he replied: “No comment mate.”

Police officers at the scene declined to say whether he was under arrest.

The man declined to give his name. Asked about why he had thrown the marbles he said: “You can ask but you are not going to get it.”

He added: “That was not a protest. Last week I heard them say it was us and them, the elite and us.”

YouTubeBritish Prime Minister Tony Blair reacts after being hit by a condom filled with purple powder in Parliament on May 19, 2004.

The breach is the most serious in the Commons in the 10 years since Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was hit by purple powder thrown from the gallery.

James Smith, 17, who is on a work placement in Parliament was in PMQs for the first time. He said that the gallery fell “dead silent” after a man in a green coat threw a large bag of marbles over the protective screen.

He said: “It was over the NHS thing, Cameron said something and this man was obviously not very happy, so he got up and threw the marbles at the window and proceeded to swear and use foul language – very foul language.

“It was dead silent, everyone was in shock – a bit shocked that this man had got up and thrown some marbles. It was immediately obvious it was marbles, a big bag of them and they went everywhere.

“The guys grabbed him and he wouldn’t go. He was saying “I’m an English gentleman, I have the right to say my bit” and then he got carted off.

“We were just ‘wow’ – and then carried on watching.”

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He added: “I don’t know how he got in because he had a big green coat on so he has obviously hidden it in there. How has he got in with a bag of marbles? I had a full body search, the guy in front of me did, the guy behind me did.”

Another man, who witnessed the security breach but did not want to be named, said that the man had been carrying an A4 size bag of marbles which he had hidden in his coat.

He said: “At the Worcester question this guy stood up and said “you are all idiots, I am English” and threw what appeared to be a bag of marbles at the screen.

“It was shocking at the time because you wonder how he got it in with a bag of marbles. After that the officials came forward and he created more fuss by shouting “don’t touch me, I’m English, don’t touch me.”

“He had no point, he did not make a statement – he just seemed to go volatile.

“We have had various checks coming through and [my partner] had to leave her handbag before coming in, and he somehow managed to smuggle in this bag, about the size of a flour bag. He didn’t offer us a game or anything!”

His partner added: “It was a bag about the size of an A4 sheet, full of marbles. There were people around picking them up and the official picking them up. It was quite a shock.”

Jim Murphy, Labour’s Shadow International Development Secretary, said there should be a “thorough inquiry” into how it was allowed to happen but “not in such a way that jeopardizes the public’s ability, to come along, to be in the public gallery but importantly meet their members of Parliament in central lobby.”

“I had constituents with me today… touring around in a relatively free way in the Palace of Westminster is a big part and a good part of our democracy.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/you-are-all-idiots-i-am-english-man-in-public-gallery-hurls-marbles-at-british-mps-during-session/feed0stdcommons_3081378bYouTubeThe Week in Wit: You can make your dream dinner party come true, you just need to become president firsthttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/the-week-in-wit-you-can-make-your-dream-dinner-party-come-true-you-just-need-to-be-president
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/the-week-in-wit-you-can-make-your-dream-dinner-party-come-true-you-just-need-to-be-president#commentsFri, 18 Jul 2014 21:30:06 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=152317

If you could invite anyone in the world, living or dead, to a dinner party, you should in turn ask your guests who in the world, living or dead, they’d invite to their fantasy dinner party. In addition to creating a fractal pattern that would eventually involve a place setting for everyone who ever lived, you’d also probably hear better answers to that parlour-game question than your original guests. (“Sorry, Beyoncé, but on Churchill’s recommendation I’m swapping you out for von Clausewitz.”)

That said, you shouldn’t ask that question. It’s a standard of fluffy icebreaker games, along the lines of the old “what books are on your nightstand?” But the reading one at least has an honest answer (“None. I have Netflix.”) When it comes to dream dinner guests, everyone tries to present their most intellectual, cultured and eclectic selves, leading to a thousand variations of Steve Jobs and Jesus sitting across from each other, each discreetly checking the time on their iPhones.

After six years in office, Barack Obama is finally exploiting one of his biggest job perks

But what if you could actually play this game? Except for the raising the dead part, one person who can convene a dinner of just about anyone is the President of the United States. This is a major job perk, one that — after six years in office — Barack Obama is finally exploiting.

Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Julie Hirschfeld Davis describes the President arriving in Rome and candidly asking the U.S. ambassador to convene a dinner the next night. An array of notable Italians, from a particle physicist to the chairman of Fiat, arrived at Obama’s table with less than 24 hours notice to discuss “the importance of understanding science, the future of the universe, how sports brings people together, and many other things.” They may have also discussed traffic and Silvio Berlusconi’s hair, but that would not be in the diplomat’s account.

Having an ambassador as your party planner is maybe not as impressive as being able to launch a nuclear bomb, but it’s certainly more constructive. As this all happened against the backdrop of a dubious survey declaring him the worst president since the Second World War, perhaps a new ranking is in order. Why not judge world leaders by the company they keep? LBJ hosted Saul Bellow; Nixon had Duke Ellington; Tony Blair entertained Geri Halliwell; Stephen Harper invited Chad Kroeger to 24 Sussex. That combination of names is, if nothing else, no one’s answer to the fantasy dinner party question.

Friday marked the seventh anniversary of Tony Blair’s resignation as British prime minister after achieving unprecedented electoral success for his Labour Party, but those seven years have not been kind to his image.

As the country’s youngest prime minister in nearly two centuries, Mr. Blair’s political life was energized by the vigour of youth but, inevitably, it also assured him a long post-political career.

And it is here his reputation has imploded.

He went right to the top and has now fallen to the very bottom. It makes for a very tragic story

“Tony Blair had been as popular a prime minister as there has been. And now, he’s the most unpopular ex-prime minister ever,” said George Jones, emeritus professor of governance at the London School of Economics & Political Science.

“He went right to the top and has now fallen to the very bottom. It makes for a very tragic story.”

Criticism of Mr. Blair, increasingly vociferous and harsh, quickly went from a series of recurrent fender-benders to a full-on highway pile-up.

Attacked for his foibles and perceived hypocrisy, his hob-knobbing and jetsetting, his failure to accept mistakes in pushing for war in Iraq, his lack of accomplishment on the world stage as a peace envoy, he has been battered in recent weeks. He was even drawn into Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, with his advice to the accused, but ultimately acquitted, editor Rebekah Brooks read out in court, each text signed, as if he was ashamed, simply as X.

AP Photo/Lefteris PitarakisRebekah Brooks, former News International chief executive, arrives to talk to members of the media, in central London, Thursday, June 26, 2014. Brooks was acquitted after a long trial centreing on illegal activity at the heart of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire.

The attacks are as diverse as they are visceral.

Mr. Blair has been assailed from the left and the right, by political opponents and former allies, by those who have long despised him and by former close friends; he has been declared “mad,” “narcissistic,” a “megalomaniac” and a “pariah.” He has been attacked by the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson — who said “Tony Blair has finally gone mad” — and his Labour predecessor, Ken Livingstone — who is calling for him to be fired as Middle East peace envoy.

“Mr. Blair is a pariah throughout this land, a megalomaniacal neo-colonialist adventurer with a Messiah complex turned rapacious money-grubbing rascal,” wrote British political columnist Matthew Norman.

Could there be a harsher indictment of the man once hailed as the Labour Party’s saviour?

A rare process of parliamentary impeachment has been launched in the House of Commons, even though Mr. Blair no longer holds public office. It could, theoretically, lead to his jailing.

LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty ImagesLondon Mayor Boris Johnson arrives for a meeting at Manchester Town Hall, north -west England on September 30, 2013.

While June 2007 marked his political demise, June 2014 seems to herald his personal downfall.

The anniversary of his departure from 10 Downing St. was ushered in by a public call for his removal as Middle East envoy, signed by a consortium of former diplomats, politicians and academics, led by Sir Richard Dalton, Mr. Blair’s former ambassador to Iran.

When Mr. Blair left the prime minister’s office, he immediately took on the role of envoy for the Quartet (the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia) involved in negotiating peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Many saw the post as a reward for his unwavering support of U.S. president George W. Bush and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesThen-Prime Minister Tony Blair meets with British soldiers on duty in Basra on Dec. 17, 2006 in Iraq.

The open letter to the Quartet calls for Mr. Blair’s firing “with immediate effect as a result of his poor performance in the role, and his legacy in the region as a whole.”

“In order to justify the invasion, Tony Blair misled the British people by claiming that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaida,” adds the letter, whose signatories include Hani Faris of the University of British Columbia.

“In the wake of recent events it is a cruel irony for the people of Iraq that perhaps the invasion’s most enduring legacy has been the rise of fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously.”

“After seven years, Mr. Blair’s achievements as envoy are negligible, even within his narrow mandate of promoting Palestinian economic development. Furthermore, the impression of activity created by his high-profile appointment has hindered genuine progress towards a lasting peace,” the letter says.

It also chastizes him for his “conduct in his private pursuits,” “a lack of transparency” in his business dealings and personal finances, and “for blurring the lines between his public position as envoy and his private roles at Tony Blair Associates and the investment bank JPMorgan Chase.”

(Among Mr. Blair’s post-politics positions is chairing the International Advisory Council of JP Morgan Chase, one of the U.S.’s largest banking institutions.)

In response, Mr. Blair’s office said, “These are all people viscerally opposed to Tony Blair with absolutely no credibility in relation to him whatsoever.

“Their attack is neither surprising nor newsworthy. They include the alliance of hard right and hard left views which he has fought against all his political life.”

Mr. Blair’s interest in finance, rather than service, has also drawn the ire of his former friend, Robert Harris. In a recent magazine interview, the best-selling author said he was disappointed Mr. Blair “cut himself off from British democracy” so he could “hang out with a lot of rich people in America.”

“Who knew that he would … be so passionately interested in making money and live this strange life with the billionaire super-rich on yachts and private jets?” asked Mr. Harris.

It may all be puzzling to Mr. Blair.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesTony Blair waves on his return from his final Prime Minister's question period on June 27, 2007 in London. Blair came to power in 1997 and in 10 years as Prime Minister won three general elections.

There was a time he seemed a political demigod. He seized the enviable, but often-elusive middle ground of being an erudite, charismatic leader of a left-wing party that was skewing right in all the popular places.

From the start, he aligned himself with the left.

After becoming a member of Parliament in 1983, he gave a rousing support for socialism in his first speech in the House of Commons, saying, “I am a socialist … because I believe that, at its best, socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral.”

But after becoming Labour leader in 1994, he shifted to the centre and galvanized Britain with his New Labour reboot of the party. He became prime minister in 1997 in a landslide win over John Major’s Conservatives.

ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty ImagesBaroness Margaret Thatcher, left, waits to greet the Queen beside then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie following a Remembrance Service commemorating 25 years since the Falklands Conflict at The Falkland Islands Memorial Chapel in Pangbourne, Berkshire, June 14, 2007.

As prime minister, he continued to shift the party’s ethos away from socialism and gained a global profile with his staunch support of the U.S after the 2001 terror attacks.

He brought unprecedented success to Labour, winning three majority governments and becoming second only to Margaret Thatcher as the longest-serving prime minister of the last century.

Now, his legacy is increasingly tainted, perhaps irrevocably.

“His political legacy could have been a great one. His efforts in pursuing a resolution to the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland led to a peace agreement there,” H.A. Hellyer, an Egypt-based fellow with the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution in Washington, wrote recently.

CARL COURT/AFP/GettyImagesA protester holds a placard bearing the slogan "Bliar" as he demonstrates outside the High Court in central London, on May 28, 2012, as former British prime minister Tony Blair gives evidence at the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics. The protesters set up outside the High Court with placards denoucing Blair and his role in sending British troops to join the 2003 war in Iraq.

“Instead, his legacy will forever be the disaster of the Iraq War and its aftermath in 2003 and onwards. This former leader of the Labour Party has become more right-wing than much of the mainstream right-wing would now dare to be publicly, which only encourages the far-right further.”

Prof. Jones maintains that much of the criticism is unjustifiably harsh.

“People have forgotten they once supported Tony Blair and cheered him on. He was the most successful Labour leader ever. He did more for the Labour Party than any other leader,” he said.

In that, no one can argue.

Regardless of history’s view on the war in Iraq, Mr. Blair’s 10 years and eight days in office, his political leanings and post-office activities, at least one legacy will remain: He knew how to win elections and win them big.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Tony Blair is not a believer in the Pottery Barn doctrine as outlined by U.S. General Colin Powell.

“You break it, you own it,” the secretary of state in the Bush administration famously said, referring to Iraq. But in an essay published on the weekend, the former British PM blames everyone, anyone, but himself for the bloody mayhem there.

The man satirical magazine Private Eye has dubbed the “Vicar of St. Albion” cannot imagine why anyone might think he was responsible. (Barack Obama is similarly inclined, but at least he has some excuse — he wasn’t in power and he correctly believes Americans are fed up with being the world’s policeman, a role for which they get little praise.)

The vicar’s self-serving remarks have been received with scorn and derision on every side. At The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson thinks the former British PM is deluded and in need of psychiatric help.

He tells us that Saddam was inevitably going to be toppled in a revolution, to be followed by a protracted and vicious religious civil war, and that therefore we (and more especially he) do not need to blame ourselves for our role in the catastrophe. As an attempt to rewrite history, this is frankly emetic …

The truth is that we destroyed the institutions of authority in Iraq without having the foggiest idea what would come next. As one senior British general has put it to me, “we snipped the spinal cord” without any plan to replace it.

The Independent’s Ian Birrell believes Blair has moved far beyond the point of parody.

Blair blames everyone but himself for the current carnage and bloodshed, he even claims to speak “with humility.”

These are the delusional and self-serving ravings of a man who just a year ago bragged that Iraq was a better place for the removal of Saddam. As he flits around the world giving speeches on democracy, while receiving huge cheques from despots, the former Labour leader seems to have lost touch with reality. No doubt, he sees himself as some kind of Churchillian figure whom history will prove right.

In the Daily Mail, General Sir Michael Rose runs through Blair’s bizarre arguments, starting with the claim because Syria’s President Assad has used chemical weapons, this retrospectively justifies invading Iraq, where no such weapons were found.

TRUTH: Leave aside, as too preposterous to merit a response, the argument that because one dictator in one country has used chemical weapons, it follows that another in a completely different country would have done so too.It was already quite clear by 2003 that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was no threat to anyone. [Although he] may have retained a latent ambition to obtain weapons of mass destruction, neither the UN inspectors before the war or the Iraq Survey Group afterwards have ever found any trace of such weapons.

Writing in The Guardian, American blogger Ana Marie Cox says Obama’s foreign policy meshes with the current mood in the U.S.

Conservative critics of Barack Obama’s foreign policy are right: it’s vague when articulated and contradictory when enacted. He refuses to act decisively and tunes out the rhetorical bravado of foreign leaders. And if the United States is to avoid another round of pointless bloodshed in the Middle East, that’s the kind of foreign policy our country needs right now. Indeed, it’s the one we want …

It is most certainly a function of having seen so many lives lost, but the American people are comfortable with inaction. Barack Obama’s foreign policy is less of a doctrine than a stance – guarded but cautious, careful but alert … just like us.

Despite the blather and hypocrisy, Blair does touch on one essential truth: Iraq, as presently constituted, is ungovernable. Like the rest of the Middle East, it is an artificial creation, carved out of the Ottoman empire by Western powers after the First World War.

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat suggests a Middle East that was more politically segregated by ethnicity and faith might become more stable and harmonious. The trouble is, the cost would be too high.

Such segregation is an underappreciated part of Europe’s 20th-century transformation into a continent at peace. As Jerry Muller argued in Foreign Affairs in 2008, the brutal ethnic cleansing and forced migrations that accompanied and followed the two world wars ensured that “for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality,” which in turn sapped away some of the “ethnonational aspirations and aggression” that had contributed to imperialism, fascism and Hitler’s rise.

But this happened after the brutal ethnic cleansing that accompanied and followed two world wars. There’s no good reason to imagine that a redrawing of Middle Eastern borders could happen much more peacefully.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/tony-blair-deluded-in-claims-hes-not-responsible-for-the-mess-in-iraq/feed0stdGeorge Bush And Tony Blair Meet At White House'Needs to be between us': Tony Blair offered to be an 'unofficial adviser' to Rupert Murdoch days before arrestshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/needs-to-be-between-us-tony-blair-offered-to-be-an-unofficial-adviser-to-rupert-murdoch-days-before-arrests
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/needs-to-be-between-us-tony-blair-offered-to-be-an-unofficial-adviser-to-rupert-murdoch-days-before-arrests#commentsWed, 19 Feb 2014 15:47:13 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=429551

LONDON — Jurors at Britain’s phone-hacking trial were told Wednesday that former prime minister Tony Blair allegedly offered to work as an unofficial adviser to Rupert Murdoch as revelations of illegal phone hacking engulfed the mogul’s media empire.

Prosecutor Andrew Edis read aloud an email sent by Rebekah Brooks, then head of Murdoch’s British newspapers, to Murdoch’s son and deputy James on July 11, 2011.

She says he told her to “keep strong and definitely (take) sleeping pills.”

Brooks also writes that Blair “is available for you, KRM (Rupert Murdoch) and me as an unofficial adviser, but needs to be between us.”

Blair Daniel Acker / Bloomberg NewsRebekah Brooks, then head of British newspapers, said Tony Blair “is available for you, KRM (Rupert Murdoch) and me as an unofficial adviser, but needs to be between us.”

She also said Blair told her to set up an external committee into phone hacking, which would “publish a Hutton-style report.” The 2004 Hutton Report cleared Blair’s government of wrongdoing over its handling of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Less than a week after sending the email, Brooks was arrested and charged with conspiring to hack phones, bribe officials and obstruct a police investigation.

All seven defendants deny charges of wrongdoing at Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun tabloids.

AP Photo / Alastair GrantFormer News of the World national newspaper editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, shown arriving at The Old Bailey law court in London on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014, are on trial along with several others on charges relating to the hacking of phones and bribing officials while they were employed at the now closed tabloid paper.

The trials stems from 2011 revelations that News of the World employees eavesdropped on the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, sports figures, royalty and even a murdered 13-year-old girl. Murdoch closed the 168-year-old newspaper amid a wave of public outrage, and the scandal expanded to ensnare Britain’s establishment — exposing a cozy web of ties between powerful politicians, senior police and media executives.

Judge John Saunders said the defence case at the trial of Brooks and six others would open Thursday after a series of legal arguments Wednesday.

The Blair email is the latest twist in a trial that has produced more revelations than a stack of tabloid front pages.

Prosecutors allege that News of the World journalists, with consent from top editors, colluded to hack phones on a vast scale in a frenzy to get scoops. They say this happened when Brooks edited the newspaper from 2000 to 2003, and under Andy Coulson from 2003 to 2007. Coulson, who became Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications chief, is also on trial.

The defence does not dispute that hacking took place. Three former News of the World news editors have pleaded guilty, as has Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the newspaper.

It’s the scale that is striking. A police witness told the court he found evidence that the News of the World hacked the phone accounts of 282 people 6,813 times. Mulcaire was paid about 100,000 pounds (now about $168,000) a year — largely, prosecutors say, for his phone-hacking prowess.

Jurors heard about efforts to hack the telephones of Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and royal aides, as well as of senior politicians and celebrities including Paul McCartney.

The defence will try to convince jurors that Brooks and Coulson were unaware of the practice, and that as busy editors they were not individually responsible for every story.

Simon Dawson / Bloomberg Glenn Mulcaire is a former private investigator who worked for News Corp.'s News of the World tabloid.

Police have already revealed that Mulcaire sought to hack the phones of Brooks and Coulson. Coulson’s lawyer, Timothy Langdale, has asked the jury to consider how his client could be “both conspirator and victim at the same time.”

Brooks and Coulson also face charges of conspiring to bribe public officials for information.

Several celebrities whose private lives were exposed by the tabloids have already testified in the trial. Actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller recounted how their relationship — and Miller’s fling with Daniel Craig — became headline news.

The private lives of Brooks and Coulson also made the front pages, when prosecutors revealed that the pair had a secret six-year affair covering a period when hacking took place. Prosecutor Andrew Edis said he was not seeking to be salacious, but disclosed details of their relationship to show that “what Mr. Coulson knew, Mrs. Brooks knew too.”

At times the evidence had touches of a spy film — or a farce.

Prosecutors used phone records, recovered emails and security-camera footage to reconstruct the day before Brooks’ arrest in 2011, when they say Brooks, her husband Charles and others conspired to hide notebooks, computers and other evidence from police.

A security man, pretending to deliver pizzas, hid some of the items in a garbage bag behind trash bins in the parking garage at the couple’s London apartment. He then sent a text to his superior — adapting a quote from the war movie “Where Eagles Dare” — that read, “Broadsword calling Danny Boy: The pizza is delivered and the chicken is in the pot.”

A cleaner found the stashed items and handed them to police. Among the items in a briefcase belonging to Charles Brooks were a Wimbledon souvenir program, the newsletter of the British Kunekune Pig Society and several pornographic DVDs.

The jury has already heard from dozens of witnesses — including detectives, journalists, royal aides and movie stars — and sifted through vast amounts of evidence, from recorded voicemail messages to telephone records, emails and payment details.

Judge John Saunders has told jurors they will most likely be sent to consider their verdicts in mid-May.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: By any measure, it was a stunning defeat for David Cameron, but not unpredictable — it appears he failed to do the math.

The British prime minister recalled parliament from its summer recess to debate military intervention in the Syrian civil war. Though he spoke eloquently, his hearers felt he didn’t make his case and voted accordingly, 285 to 272 against.

It was the first time in more than 50 years the House of Commons has failed to support a government motion for military action. The last time this happened was during the Suez crisis in 1956, a foreign expedition that ended in disaster for the Brits.

Cameron has to be held responsible for the latest debacle.

Buoyed up by the belief in the righteousness of his cause, the prime minister failed to take elementary precautions. He did not attempt to get rebels in his Tory party onside and the haste with which the vote was called meant many MPs who might have supported the government could not get to London in time. Two ministers missed the vote because the were chatting.

“Government whips must now wish they had done everything bar scrambling RAF jets to make sure MPs like this were around to vote,” noted a Financial Times blogger.

Then there was the Iraq factor. Many MPs — and Britons at large — believe the country’s involvement in the war against Saddam Hussein was a disaster. They are still angry at having been bamboozled by the weapons of mass destruction argument so eloquently put forward by then-PM Tony Blair — and which proved to be false.

As Jack Straw, a former Blair foreign secretary, noted during the debate, “We all know — I have the scars about this — how easy it is to get into military action and how difficult it is to get out of it.”

The Daily Telegraph’s Fraser Nelson terms Cameron’s defeat “perhaps the biggest humiliation of his premiership.” (He does not hazard a guess as to what might be bigger.)

To be forced to dilute the motion at the last minute was bad enough, but to suffer a rebellion on this magnitude – even on the watered-down motion – is devastating. British prime ministers are just not supposed to lose votes on issues as fundamental as war and peace. This represents not just an extraordinary defeat, but a catastrophic political misjudgment …

Mr. Cameron lost due to the simple weakness of his case, which he had not spent enough time preparing. Are we seriously telling [Bashar al] Assad that it’s quite all right to wage a war that kills 100,000 Syrians if he kindly does so with shrapnel? Will a missile strike speed the end of the civil war? Where is the evidence that Britain, America or anyone else can prevent the use of chemical weapons in Syria again?

At the Financial Times, Kiran Stacey says the PM’s arrogance was a key factor.

Cameron recalled parliament to vote on an issue of going to war, without properly having prepared the ground. The case for launching strikes on Syria had not been made, the consequences had not been spelled out, and the intelligence was slim.

Plenty of rebels have told us in the last 48 hours they were not properly consulted before the vote, and that they might have changed their mind had they been talked through the prime minister’s reasoning. Specifically, they argue, if they had been given greater assurance this first vote was not a prelude to war, they might have been able to back the government.

In another commentary in the Telegraph, Norman Tebbit — a Tory peer who took part in debate in the Lords, who also rejected the motion — believes the Commons’ vote was primarily an expression of non-confidence in the government.

[It] was less a vote specifically against any possible military intervention in Syria [than] an expression of a lack of confidence in the ability or willingness of the government to think through the consequences of its policies over a far wider front that Syria. That has long been my prime concern about this government and it now seems to have become more widely shared.

Indeed I begin to think that if Mr. Cameron is ousted from No. 10, it will not be by [Labour leader Ed] Milliband or [UK Independence party leader Nigel] Farage, but by his own hand.

In the Evening Standard, Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for prime minister Tony Blair, says his old boss has a lot to answer for.

[T]his was the week when it dawned on the political class just how long a shadow Iraq still casts: how the 10 years marked last spring since that war’s beginning had not, in fact, been long enough to judge its impact on our democracy …

Blair’s speech on March 18 2003 was a masterpiece: impassioned, its logic laser-like. It was the life-or-death gamble of a political genius — and he won. It was also deeply disingenuous and committed us to a disastrous war. Ten years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, most of the predictions of the war’s opponents have proved correct. The Middle East has become more violent and unstable. Terrorism has spread rather than ended.

That is why Cameron’s own supporters — much less Labour — did not believe his eloquence.

OTTAWA — It’s nearly 20 years since Tony Blair shocked the British Labour Party establishment by calling for the overturn of Clause IV of the party’s constitution, which committed Labour to ‘‘common ownership of the production, distribution and exchange.’’

It was considered a fundamental breach with the party’s past, ­ an end to any pretense that Labour intended to change the capitalist economic system. The speech came just over a decade after Labour was thrashed at the polls on a platform dubbed by one of its own members as the ‘‘longest suicide note in political history,’’ replete with pledges to re-nationalize industries and a commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

The Blair speech went a long way to making Labour electable again for the middle class.

This weekend, NDP leader Tom Mulcair will have his own Clause IV moment at the party’s convention in Montreal, where delegates will be asked to back a resolution that offers a new preamble to the party’s constitution. The existing wording also talks about the need to ‘‘modify and control the operations of the monopolistic and distributive organizations,’’ where necessary through ‘‘extension of the principle of social ownership.’’

Under the new wording, the party sees government’s role as ‘‘addressing the limitations of the market, by addressing the common good, by having the power to act in the public interest, for social and economic justice, and for the integrity of the environment.’’

It is an acknowledgment that Stephen Harper has moved the yardstick of electability permanently to the right, in the same way that Tony Blair’s move signaled Margaret Thatcher’s reforms were the new orthodoxy (while he later introduced some new employment laws, he did not reverse Mrs. Thatcher’s anti-union legislation.)

The formal move from being an old 20th century socialist party to a modern 21st century social democratic party began under the late Jack Layton, which may prove useful to Mr. Mulcair, who remains the subject of suspicion for many NDP traditionalists.

When I reached him in Copenhagen late Thursday, where he is attending a Progressive Governance conference, I asked if he saw himself as a latter day Blair-ite.

‘‘I’m more of a Layton-ite. Jack was pretty good at emphasizing pragmatism over ideology. You’ve got to be practical to get results,’’ he said.

Mr. Mulcair said the party is merely ‘‘refreshing and modernizing’’ the language to reflect the times. ‘‘Social democracy was always about removing inequality in our society – but today, one of the biggest inequalities is between generations. The environment and sustainability are now front and centre, which is different from an era where the main battle was on the economic front.’’

While some things change, though, others will remain the same. Mr. Mulcair is backing resolutions that support the 66-year-old Rand formula that makes payment of trade union dues mandatory, and others that call for the party to repeal Bill C-377, which obliges unions to disclose where they spend their money.

‘‘I firmly believe that the Rand formula has brought social peace,’’ he said.

‘‘On Bill C-377, it is my personal and legal opinion that it is patently illegal.’’

The game has just turned into a political talent show, where even more weight will be placed on personality, audience response and stage appearance

How refreshed Canadians will feel by this makeover remains to be seen. What is clear is that the honeymoon Mr. Mulcair enjoyed after winning the leadership over a year ago has faded.

At that time, NDP polling numbers rose above the Conservatives, and NDP staff talked about ‘‘when we form government.’’

Now, the party is in third place and a new Nanos poll suggests that Mr. Mulcair trails both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau on four out of five criteria (he beat Mr. Trudeau on ‘‘experience,’’ but so could just about anyone who’s allowed out on their own after dark).

This weekend presents an opportunity for Mr. Mulcair to persuade the NDP rank and file that the preamble change is not about changing the party but about changing the country. By removing any reference to common ownership, the hope is that suburban voters may take a second look at the NDP.

Like Mr. Blair, he will point out that winning will require the pursuit of economic prosperity, as well as social justice. But that’s probably where the comparisons end.

Unlike Mr. Blair, or even Mr. Layton, Tom Mulcair is not a natural populist.

The former Labour leader once admitted that he was able to manipulate people for his own gain, ­ a form of practical intelligence that means knowing what to say, when to say it and how to say it for maximum effect.

For all his strengths as a formidable debater, organizer and campaigner, Mr. Mulcair lacks those soft skills.

This could prove fatal to his chances of ever becoming prime minister – the game has just turned into a political talent show, where even more weight will be placed on personality, audience response and stage appearance.

Mr. Mulcair’s personal brand is in much need of a makeover as preamble.

Tom Mulcair got himself elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party on a promise he would bring hard-headed realism and a centrist political ethic to the job. He was to be, it was murmured at the time, the NDP’s Tony Blair.

As it turns out, there’s little indeed of Blair’s famous economic pragmatism in Mulcair. He talks the talk but, when push comes to shove, quacks like a duck. Currently, the NDP leader is tromping with big, gnarled feet all over the delicate buds of the Keystone XL pipeline. Criticism of his criticisms, while on a recent Washington D.C. trip, he dismisses as Conservative hypocrisy. All opposition leaders attack the governing party’s positions when travelling overseas!

Except, that Keystone and the issues tied to it are not just political baubles to be toyed with. These are fundamental, shared economic problems – the greatest Canadians now face. The Obama administration’s pending approval or rejection will affect us all from coast to coast to coast, for many years to come. And much of Mulcair’s rhetoric about Keystone is either poorly researched, half-true or spun-up by ideological assumptions that do not hold up for a second in the cold light of day.

First let’s address the idea that Alberta’s nefarious Big Oil oligarchs are foisting oilsands development on a reluctant Eastern Canada, whose citizens will only suffer as the resultant global warming turns James Bay into a gigantic hot tub. This is the putative value proposition: Albertans benefit economically from the oilsands, but the rest of us are harmed. Why should their interests subsume ours?

Nonsense. The Conference Board of Canada found in a report last October (Fuel for Thought: The Economic Benefits of Oil Sands Developments for Canada’s Regions) that $100 billion has been invested in the oilsands in the past decade. But that is dwarfed by the $364 billion in price-adjusted investment expected between now and 2035. That breaks down, according to the report’s authors, as 880,000 person-years of employment stemming directly from investment, and an additional supply-chain effect of 1.45 million person-years.

That’s 3,970 person-years of employment per billion spent, not only in the obvious industries, such as oilfield services, but also in professional services, manufacturing, wholesale trade, financial services and transportation.

The punch line: Alberta gains – but so does everyone else. Ontario, the Conference Board estimates, will garner about 15 per cent of the supply-chain economic spinoffs, mainly in service industries such as administrative services, scientific and technical consulting, and computer services.

There’s an even larger national effect, which should galvanize any good social democrat: Taxes

There are direct manufacturing spinoffs for the east, the report’s authors say: Makers of steel, steel pipes and tubes, valves, navigational, measuring, and other instruments, all will benefit. In B.C., manufacturers of plastic building materials and storage tanks, paper and wood products will see increased demand. The port of Vancouver is expected to undergo a boom in traffic from Asia. In Quebec, computer services, rail transport, communications and insurance firms will gain.

But there’s an even larger national effect, which should galvanize any good social democrat: Taxes. Between 2012 and 2035, the Conference Board estimates, oilsands-related investment is expected to generate nearly $80 billion in tax, on an inflation-adjusted basis, comprising personal income tax, corporate tax, and indirect taxes such as sales and fuel taxes. Of that $80 billion, the greatest share — $45.3 billion — is federal. In other words: There’s your health care. Or there’s your defence procurement. Take your pick of whatever federal service you most value.

Ah, but the NDP doesn’t want the oilsands shuttered, Mulcair says. Rather he wants the bitumen shipped east, and refined and processed in Canada, creating new jobs at home, rather than “exporting” them south. Which sounds fine — except that it’s not an either-or proposition. The economic health of the oilpatch, and thus Canada, depends on bitumen flowing south, and east, and west, and northwest, at the same time. Such is the projected demand for crude over the next 20 years, and such is the glut now in the Midwest, which is causing Canadian crude to trade at a sharp discount to the world price. The “eastern option” is not an alternative — it’s a complement. And it’s happening anyway, Keystone aside.

But here is the greatest harm, possibly, in Mulcair’s recent rhetoric: He seems blissfully unaware that, just now, on this file, even the opposition leader’s words can matter, a lot. That’s because the crux of (President Barack) Obama’s decision is political, not economic or environmental. Each time Mulcair sounds a negative note on Keystone, he makes it easier for Washington to bow to the Hollywood Green lobby, and avoid making the right, if difficult, choice. He also makes it easier for Harper to absolve himself of blame, should Obama turn thumbs-down.

Is this a harbinger of the “competent, responsible public administration,” we’ve heard so much about? If so, then New Democrats were sold a bill of goods. There’s no Blairite Third Way here: It’s the same-old, same-old, dooming the NDP to return to the Stygian depths from whence it came: third place.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Of course hindsight is 20-20, but 10 years after the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq, wholehearted supporters are thin on the ground.

Americans now see all too clearly how the Bush administration, ably supported by then-British PM Tony Blair, pulled the wool over their eyes about weapons of mass destruction. In this stampede to war, they were aided by a jingoistic media, from Fox News to The New York Times, many of whose members now regret their hawkish ways.

The Iraq expedition can’t even be excused by the “end justifies the means” argument. Although it did remove Saddam Hussein, it came at high cost: more than US$3-trillion, with a butcher’s bill of 4,486 U.S. soldiers killed, 32,226 U.S. wounded and more than 100,000 Iraqi dead.

In the process, America’s honour has been stained by such shameful incidents as the torture in Abu Ghraib prison, and the many unlawful killings of civilians by its trigger-happy troops.

Nor is the world a safer place. Iraq remains unstable and riven by sectarian strife; with its Shiite-headed government is cozying up to Shiite Iran; there is civil war in Syria; turmoil in Egypt; and Islamist terrorists are making swathes of northern and central Africa a no-go area for westerners.

James Fellowes at The Atlantic magazine believes the decision to invade was,

the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II and perhaps over a much longer period. Vietnam was costlier and more damaging, but also more understandable. As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a “war of choice” whose costs we are still paying.

At The Daily Beast, David Frum struggles to find some good amid the disasters.

The replacement regime in Iraq is not a democracy in any usual sense of the word. The Arab Middle East is more unstable than ever. Islamists now rule Egypt and probably soon will rule Syria … But one argument often used by war-skeptics has proven emphatically wrong. It was often said that the Iraq war would serve only to strengthen Iran …[Instead it] has led to a huge shift in regional oil production. Iraq is returning to world oil markets, massively. Last year Iraq produced more oil than in any year since the first Gulf War. By some estimates, Iraq will soon overtake Russia as the world’s No. 2 oil exporter. Iran meanwhile has dropped out of the top 10 oil-exporting countries.

Writing in the British newspaper The Observer, an unapologetic Nick Cohen insists the case for removing Saddam Hussein remains valid.

Every few months a member of the audience at a meeting I am addressing asks whether I regret supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The look in their eyes is both imploring and accusatory – “surely you must agree with me now”, it seems to say.
I reply that I regret much: the disbanding of the Iraqi army; a de-Ba’athification program that became a sectarian purge of Iraq’s Sunnis; the torture of Abu Ghraib; and a failure to impose security that allowed murderous sectarian gangs to kill tens of thousands.
For all that, I say, I would not restore the Ba’ath if I had the power to rewind history. To do so would be to betray people who wanted something better after 35 years of tyranny.

At the St. Louis American,Jamala Rogers lays into the Bush administration for its persistent lies.

Day after day, interview after interview, these war mongers looked us in the eye and fed the world a deceptive stew of uranium bought by Saddam Hussein from Niger, weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), connections between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, mythical meetings of terrorists and a heap of other falsehoods.
By 2005, it was clear that there were no WMDS yet Bush continued to push forward with the war. President Obama finally declared end of the Iraq War at the end of 2011. To this day, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condi Rice admit no guilt or remorse about their decision to invade Iraq under false pretences. So the question remains, why are these war criminals not being tried for treason or hauled before the International Criminal Court?

A repentant Rod Dreher at the American Conservative concedes those who opposed the war were right, even if they were radicals, one of the dirtiest word in the American political lexicon.

I covered a big antiwar march in Manhattan in the spring of 2002, and the radicals were a disgusting bunch. “Bush = Hitler” signs, and so forth. As foul as it was, the event was a pleasant thing to see, in a way, because it made me feel more secure in the rightness of the war the U.S. was about to undertake. And it shouldn’t be forgotten in those days that some antiwar people were nasty and hysterical, and impossible to talk to.
For all that … they were right about the only question that counted — Should the U.S. launch a war on Iraq? — and my side was wrong. I was wrong. I had allowed myself to be swayed by emotion, even as I spited the emotional hysteria of the antiwar crowd.

In his September 2 Guardian editorial, “Why I had no choice but to spurn Tony Blair,” Desmond Tutu reproduces the canonical indictments with which opponents of the Iraq war, as well as supporters, are familiar. In doing so he commits familiar errors, and it is to these I shall advert your attention, dear reader, in the hope of furthering a clear-sighted assessment.

Tutu’s indictment rests upon a moral foundation, and anticipates a moral response. He does not defer to the war’s uncertain legality or to the many technical issues which spilled into the gap between the first and second Gulf wars. As a supporter of the war, both then and now, I find myself wishing this were otherwise. The Bush administration argued regime change on the weakest of all available grounds, confident that fear and indignation would deliver public support to the administration’s ambitions. The Iraq war resolution of October 16, 2002, passed by the U.S. Congress, itemized the crimes of Saddam Hussein. Yet when it came time to argue for the war, cynical insinuations took the place of facts. Americans were encouraged to believe that Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks, and that further WMD assaults were likely on the way.

By the late 1990s there was, in my assessment, a sound and compelling case for regime change. Long before the 2003 war, there were many calling for the establishment of an ad-hoc tribunal specifically constituted to bring the Iraqi dictator to an overdue and necessary reckoning. The formal charges against him included war crimes (for the use of chemical weapons against Iran), genocide of the Kurds, the attempted annexation of a neighbouring state, non-compliance with UN resolutions, and violations of international law — all amply substantiated and a matter of public record. By the time of the war Iraq no longer was able to produce weapons of mass destruction, but as the man in charge of Iraq’s nuclear program, Mahdi Obeidi, has written (in his book The Bomb in My Garden)

There was no active nuclear weapons program before the invasion of Iraq. However, Saddam certainly had the capabilities and, it must be presumed, the intention to restart it someday when the world was no longer watching him so closely.

The moral character of the war is to be distinguished from its legal character. On the moral side, the brutality of the invasion and the enormous suffering thereby inflicted does not constitute the final, unchallengeable case against regime change. All war is violent and offensive and a reprehensible instance of human failure. One must add to this the observations that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was not peaceful, and that two decades of systemic terror against civil society made civil war likely in a post-Saddam Iraq. The ever-present tone of moral smugness adopted by the war’s critics derives from the unassailable security of knowing we shall never witness the endgame of non-intervention, and that whatever happens in Iraq henceforth can and will be blamed on the invasion.

On the legal side, it is a matter of topmost importance how a government advocates war. We now know that fear-mongering and shoddy intelligence were offered not only for public consumption, but for the consumption also of government officials tasked with voting on the requisite legislation. One can support the stated war goals and yet hold in contempt the means deployed, as in this case I do.

Thus far I’ve tried to suggest that the legal case against the war is far stronger than the moral, and that Tutu puts himself on relatively weak grounds when he argues that “the immorality of the United States and Great Britain’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilized and polarized the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.” How could one even go about assessing such a broad and imprecise claim in a court of law?

Tutu freely departs from the rails of logic when he laments the coming apart of the “global family,” again an outcome of failed American and British leadership. Turning from the body count, Tutu levels his core indictment:

But even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world. Has the potential for terrorist attacks decreased? To what extent have we succeeded in bringing the so-called Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds closer together, in sowing the seeds of understanding and hope?

Here we arrive at the most familiar and empty of the familiar errors. Somehow in the moral calculations of the war’s opponents, the offence always lands in the Western column of the ledger. Iraq’s sufferings have nothing to do with the Ba’athist crime syndicate, whose sadism provided the occasion for war in the first place. Tutu blames not the Revolutionary Guards or Assad’s Alawite thugs for the current state of Syria and Iran: these too are the fault of Bush and Blair. As the world’s conflagrations threaten to swallow God’s family, Tutu conveniently fails to notice that it’s the respective parties of God pouring on the gasoline.

This omission of the real source of our family’s sectarian violence undermines the moral credibility of Tutu’s position and makes his greasy pontification especially hard to stomach. “You are a member of our family, God’s family. You are made for goodness, for honesty, for morality, for love; so are our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in the U.S., in Syria, in Israel and Iran,” he oozes to an absent Blair. But what on earth is this to mean if military action against the world’s theocratic fascists and dictators earns one condemnation while at the same time the crimes of these same theocrats and dictators are cleansed from the public record? The chief moral failure of the anti-war movement is its evident belief that whatever the crimes of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, the crimes of Tony Blair are worse and the only ones worth mentioning.

This kind of accounting can never yield an honest and credible summation of the Iraq war’s legitimacy, moral rightness and legacy. Whether or not our brothers and sisters were “made for goodness,” some of them are committed to the destruction of apostate and infidel. Saddam Hussein seems to have been made, like the communist Russian dictator he both admired and emulated, for engendering terror among his rivals. As long as our world produces people such as these, leaders must from time to time have recourse to the necessary evil of war. In the work of analyzing this particular one, Desmond Tutu has set a poor example. Nonetheless the work remains an important moral obligation.

National Post

Wayne K. Spear was born at Buffalo, New York and grew up in southern Ontario. He is a writer of essays, newspaper articles, fiction, and poetry and has worked in communications, health, and education. His next book is scheduled to be published in 2013 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

LONDON — Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu called Sunday for Tony Blair and George Bush to face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for their role in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq

Tutu, the retired Anglican Church’s archbishop of South Africa, wrote in an op-ed piece for The Observer newspaper that the ex-leaders of Britain and the United States should be made to “answer for their actions.”

The Iraq war “has destabilized and polarized the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history,” wrote Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984.

“Those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague,” he added.

The Hague, Netherlands, based court is the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal and has been in operation for 10 years. So far it has launched prosecutions only in Africa, including in Sudan, Congo, Libya and Ivory Coast.

Tutu has long been a staunch critic of the Iraq war, while others opposed to the conflict — including playwright Harold Pinter — have previously called for Bush and Blair to face prosecution at the Hague.

“The then-leaders of the U.S. and U.K. fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand — with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us,” said Tutu, who last week withdrew from a conference in South Africa due to Blair’s presence at the event.

Jason Reed / ReutersU.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, May 17, 2007. Others opposed to the Iraq war — including playwright Harold Pinter — have previously called for Bush and Blair to face prosecution at the Hague.

While the International Criminal Court can handle cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, it does not currently have the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes of aggression. Any potential prosecution over the Iraq war would likely come under the aggression category.

The U.S. is among nations which do not recognize the International Criminal Court.

In response to Tutu, Blair said he had great respect for the archbishop’s work to tackle apartheid in South Africa, but accused him of repeating inaccurate criticisms of the Iraq war.

“To repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown,” Blair said. “And to say that the fact that Saddam (deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein) massacred hundreds of thousands of his citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre.”

However, Blair said that “in a healthy democracy people can agree to disagree.”

In Britain, a two-year long inquiry examining the buildup to the Iraq war and its conduct is yet to publish its final report. The panel took evidence from political leaders including Blair, military chiefs and intelligence officers. Two previous British studies into aspects of the war cleared Blair’s government of wrongdoing.

The Iraq war was bitterly divisive in the U.K. and saw large public demonstrations. However, Blair subsequently won a 2005 national election, though with a reduced majority.

My first observation on these Olympics: The Canadians were robbed in their women’s soccer match, and the treatment of that team has been a disgrace. This, and the fiasco with the badminton players who threw matches to get an easier play-off run, are, I am afraid, the tip of the iceberg in the skullduggery that afflicts the administration of the Games.

The admission of professional athletes to the Olympics is at some philosophical variance to the amiable credo about conduct being more important than winning. Moreover, the leading countries, especially the Chinese, Americans and Russians, have been chiefly motivated by the desire to make a political statement for their country. And all the hokum about international brotherhood through sport bears little relationship to the heavy funding and monomaniacal training that are essential to such massive accumulations of Olympic medals as those countries achieve.

My second observation is that these 2012 Games are a fine illustration of the fact that, for all its deterioration in recent years, Great Britain is still a serious country.

The opening show was brilliantly conceived and executed. While it certainly did not approach the Chinese in the billions that were spent constructing architectural landmarks, or in the precision and discipline that only an autocratic regime can produce, the London opener was a triumph of another, and distinctly British, kind. Kenneth Branagh’s sequence on British history at the opening was imaginative and quite absorbing, and given the versatility of his thespian repertoire, it is a high compliment to say that his portrayal of a top-hatted, cigar-wielding Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was one of his most effective.

The emphasis on British culture, civility and industrial history were entirely justified. It is easy to forget that the world owes to that small island the invention and propagation of parliamentary democracy, the Common Law, the English language and the Industrial Revolution. (The performance in honour of the National Health Service, which is a major national problem and a sacred cow rivaled only by the BBC, was dispensable. Most advanced countries have superior health systems to Britain’s, and those that aspire to universal coverage will not be taking the NHS as their inspiration.)

As, and as I am frequently reminded, a citizen of that country, and a member of its Parliament, I hope I will be pardoned for waving the Union flag a little. Britain enjoys its status despite having allowed the departure of most of its manufacturing, and has few natural resources. The three full terms of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown effectively squandered almost all the comparative fiscal and economic strength that Margaret Thatcher had retrieved from decades of “Butskillism” (named after long-serving Tory grandee Rab Butler and 1950s-era Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskill, and referring to bi-partisan soft-left appeasement of militant labour unions, and an immense public sector devoted altogether to disincentivizing work and massaging money around irrespective of merit).

Blair and Brown steadily increased stealth taxes on transactions and businesses, but not individuals, and thus became the only Labour Party leaders to gain consecutive terms, a modest achievement. It took Blair and Brown three terms to bring the country to its knees, the posture from which the Conservatives normally set out to retrieve it.

The British financial industry, and various forms of consulting, international law and other sophisticated expertise, provided a powerful engine of economic growth in London and the Southeast, which has been imperiled by Labour’s profligacy and addiction to tax increases. In the last three years, the London area has been sustained only by the waves of foreign unrest or actuated political death wishes that have driven (private jet) airlifts of the wealthy from the Middle East and parts of Europe, especially Russia, and most recently France, after the election of a lunatic Socialist government in Paris, to London. This is not a long-term economic strategy for Britain. Yet, as I say, it remains, as it is demonstrating, and as was implicit and strongly expressed in the observations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, a serious country.

This brings me to my third observation. Britain, under the misguided influence of Edward Heath (prime minister 1970-1974), dove headlong into what was then only a European Common Market, abandoning the Commonwealth, whose more purposeful members — Canada, Australia and New Zealand — had given their all for Britain in two world wars. Margaret Thatcher, once the Eurofederalists had gained control in Brussels and were trying to reduce all western Europe to satellized, socialist satrapies, put on the brakes and rushed into an historic embrace with Ronald Reagan in the special relationship, which had its finest hour since the piping days of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Between them and with powerful assistance from John Paul II and some allies, including Brian Mulroney and Helmut Kohl, they won and ended the Cold War.

But now the United States is uninterested and is in gradual, more or less orderly withdrawal from the world, and Britain is an orphan to larger associations of countries. Europe is in shambles, and what will be saved will be benignly dominated by Germany, especially opposite a France that has suffered a national implosion of rational political judgment.

The most rational international political association, for Britain and Canada, would be a senior tier of the Commonwealth — the U.K., Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand and Singapore, all English-speaking democracies. All the members could focus their development activities on India, to aid it in rivaling China. Those countries have more in common than Britain does with Europe, or even than most of them have with the United States.

Not that our efforts would be combined in the Olympics. But as of Friday morning, those senior Commonwealth countries had a combined total of well over 100 medals — more than the individual totals for China or the United Sates (or Russia and its former satellites). An association, to be redefined in the light of the failings of the EU and the limitations of alliance with America, of the more successful states of the Commonwealth makes more sense now than ever. As in all things, what is needed is a bit of leadership and imagination.

National Post

cbletters@gmail.com

In my column about the Quebec election on Aug. 2, I inadvertently implied that Jean Chrétien, rather than Stephen Harper, was the prime minister in 2007. I apologize for my incomplete edit.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Tony Blair’s appearance at the Leveson inquiry into British media has reminded people just why they don’t miss him.

Put it simply, he’s not believable. And they certainly don’t want to hear a peep out of him. The idea he is seriously mulling a comeback to frontline politics (and has hired a PR person to help him) may be too much for swallow.

He’s still the man who lied to Britons over Iraq. Indeed, proceedings at the inquiry were briefly interrupted by a genteel protest from a man who shouted “war criminal!”

The five years since Blair left office have done little to improve his image. Endlessly globetrotting, he has shown there is almost nowhere he will not go in his quest to make money. His latest gig — helping the Kazakh dictator present a better face to the west — isn’t helping much.

Nor are his explanations for cosying up to Rupert Murdoch and his media might. (The rest of the British press he dismissed as feral, reserving particular scorn for the Daily Mail for persecuting him and his family, especially his wife Cherie.)

The resulting commentary has British media united across the political spectrum — a rare feat. For editorial writers at The Daily Telegraph (tony, conservative), Blair’s performance was a masterclass in historical revisionism

He told the inquiry: “I can’t believe we are the first and only government that has ever wanted to put the best possible gloss on what we’re doing – that is a completely different thing to saying that you go out to say things that are deliberately untrue.”
That simply will not do. The government that he led changed for ever the terms of trade between government and media. It used spin, manipulation, statistical trickery, bullying and sometimes outright mendacity to try to secure the coverage it wanted. No previous administration had gone to such extreme and disreputable lengths to secure good headlines; squaring the media was central to everything Labour did. It was no coincidence that the most powerful figure – after the prime minister and chancellor – was Mr. Blair’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell.

Journalists at the Daily Mail (mid-market, conservative) were in sparkling form after Blair’s accusations, managing to insert the price of his country home into an editorial — a characteristic Mail obsession.

This was vintage Blair, a virtuoso thespian performance worthy of the previous owner of his £4-million mansion , the actor Sir John Gielgud.
His voice husky with sincerity, the former premier portrayed himself at the Leveson inquiry … as the innocent victim of a feral press.
And how the old magic worked. His insidious relationship with Rupert Murdoch? The fact Tony Blair was the architect of the News International/No. 10 axis that still corrupts public life today? The way his administration manipulated and misled a largely supine media, climaxing in the lies over the Iraq War?
Little if any of this arose in the deferential questioning of Robert Jay Q.C., who instead allowed Mr. Blair to demonize his media critics.

Mail columnist Quentin Letts provided appeared to be reviewing a theatrical performance when he noted,

Many old Blairish tics were there: the right eyebrow arched, Norma Desmond style, in world-weary dismay; the double index-finger point downwards; the horse coughs of sardonic disbelief. He was lean, tanned, becoming episcopal in his piety as he dropped his chin and stared ahead, eyeballs crossing.

Editorial writers at the Daily Mirror (working class, red-top) also laid into the former PM.

Despite being PM with a significant majority for 13 years, he gave the impression that he was forever undermined by a hostile media.
He decried the blurring of news and comment – a common whinge of British politicians since the popular press first found its voice in the late 18th century.
Yet he defended Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants, not unsurprisingly as Mr Blair has enjoyed overwhelmingly positive coverage from the mogul’s newspapers.
The message was classic TB: the Press who didn’t agree with him needs smacking down, while Mr. Murdoch is a nice chap who never asked for or received political favours. Ever.

It’s left to Richard Heller, writing at politics.co.uk, to point out the most terrifying thing about Blair:

[He] seriously believes that he is entitled to a [frontline role in British politics] and that the British people should be grateful for his wisdom. Once again, he has demonstrated one of his terrifying strengths as a politician – he is never embarrassed by himself. Tony Blair has religion without shame. The Anglican Prayer Book invites congregations to examine their hearts. When Tony Blair examines his heart he always gives it an A-Star …
For millions of British people the one thing that they want to hear from Tony Blair is “I’m sorry” and it’s the one thing he never can bring himself to say.

compiled by Araminta Wordsworth awordsworth@nationalpost.com

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/five-years-on-britons-still-not-ready-to-forgive-ex-pm-tony-blair/feed0stdTOPSHOTS A protester holds a placard beaTony Blair says he feared the wrath of British media as prime ministerhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/tony-blair-says-he-feared-the-wrath-of-british-media-as-prime-minister
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/tony-blair-says-he-feared-the-wrath-of-british-media-as-prime-minister#commentsMon, 28 May 2012 11:55:34 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=177206

LONDON — Tony Blair said on Monday he decided to court the media in Britain rather than risk the wrath of powerful media tycoons during his decade as prime minister.

Blair, the most powerful British prime minister since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, said that even he was not willing to risk offending the major media groups.

“If you’re a political leader and you’ve got very powerful media groups and you fall out with one of those groups, the consequences is such that you… are effectively blocked from getting across your message,” Blair told the inquiry under oath at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

“I’m being open about the fact that frankly I decided as a political leader, and this was a strategic decision, that I was going to manage that and not confront it. And we can get on to whether that was right or wrong at a later stage, but that was the decision I took,” he said.

Blair’s relationship with the press, and Rupert Murdoch in particular, came under scrutiny at the inquiry which has broadened out to examine the close ties between politicians, the press and police after initially looking at a phone hacking scandal at a mass-selling tabloid.

Blair said the close relationship between politicians and the media was inevitable but that it became unhealthy when media groups tried to use their newspapers as instruments of political power.

The inquiry has so far focused on the conduct of the media and the close ties between Murdoch’s empire and serving ministers, helping the opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband consolidate his position with attacks on the current British Prime Minister David Cameron.

But the grilling of Blair, who was renowned for trying to control the media agenda by “spinning” the news to gain the most favorable coverage, could undermine Miliband’s attempt to portray Labour under his leadership as a party above courting media tycoons.

CARL COURT/AFP/Getty Images A protester holds a placard bearing the slogan "Bliar" as he demonstrates outside the High Court in central London, on May 28, 2012, as former British prime minister Tony Blair gives evidence at the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics.

LABOUR AND MURDOCH

While Blair is no longer active in British politics, the inquiry may still prove uncomfortable as it examines issues such as his decision, after stepping down as prime minister, to become a godfather to Murdoch’s daughter Grace at a ceremony on the banks of the river Jordan.

“Blair led the way in having no shame about courting Murdoch,” said Ivor Gaber, professor of political journalism at City university.

“He set the style and the standard and if you regard Cameron as the ‘heir to Blair’ then it’s not exactly surprising that he followed suit.”

Murdoch told the inquiry last month that he had never asked a prime minister for anything.

Blair set the tone for his relationship with Britain’s press when, before his first election victory in 1997, he flew to Australia in 1995 to speak before a gathering of Murdoch’s executives who had previously used their British tabloids to vilify his Labour Party predecessors.

The decision infuriated much of his left-of-centre party who saw the Australian-born tycoon as a right-winger who had helped to keep them out of power for years.

“People would be horrified,” Blair said later in his autobiography. “On the other hand … not to go was to say carry on and do your worst, and we knew their worst was very bad indeed.”

“The country’s most powerful newspaper proprietor, whose publications have hitherto been rancorous in their opposition to the Labour Party, invites us into the lion’s den. You go, don’t you?”

Blair’s speech to Murdoch executives received a standing ovation and Murdoch indicated for the first time that he could be willing to switch the allegiance of his newspapers to the Labour Party.

“If our flirtation is ever consummated Tony then I suspect we will end up making love like porcupines, very, very carefully,” he told him.

With the backing of Murdoch’s top-selling Sun tabloid, Blair swept to power in 1997 and again in 2001 and 2005. But with an ever increasing reputation for public relations “spin,” he started to face questions over his sincerity.

Much of that came to a head when Blair and then U.S. President George W. Bush agreed to invade Iraq, going against the public opinion in Britain.

Blair is likely to be asked why he spoke to Murdoch three times in the days leading up to the Iraq war and whether this had any impact on the fact that all Murdoch’s papers supported the unpopular invasion. He was not asked about his ties to Rupert Murdoch in early questioning on Monday.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/tony-blair-says-he-feared-the-wrath-of-british-media-as-prime-minister/feed3stdA still image from broadcast footage shows Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking at the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the media at the High Court in London May 28, 2012. A protester holds a placard bearing the slogan "Bliar" as he demonstrates outside the High Court in central London, on May 28, 2012, as former British prime minister Tony Blair gives evidence at the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics. Under Blair, Britain’s politics and media ‘incestuous,’ says U.K. MPhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/under-blair-britains-politics-and-media-incestuous-says-u-k-mp
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/under-blair-britains-politics-and-media-incestuous-says-u-k-mp#commentsWed, 16 May 2012 14:43:09 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=173914

LONDON — Britain’s politicians and its powerful media were uncomfortably close while Tony Blair ran the country, a former U.K. minister said Wednesday.

Jack Straw, who held several key posts, told an official inquiry into media ethics that journalists and Blair’s Labour Party had forged “very, very close, sometimes incestuous” ties while Blair strived for power, and that those links endured when he became prime minister in 1997.

Blair served as Britain’s chief for a decade — handing over to his successor Gordon Brown in 2007.

Current British Prime Minister David Cameron has already acknowledged he developed ties to the media that were “too close” while he was opposition chief.

Straw, who served as foreign secretary, home secretary, and justice secretary, said he believed that newspaper baron Rupert Murdoch, whose holdings extend to television and film, took advantage of his relationships with lawmakers to consolidate his media interests.

“The perception I have got is that Mr. Murdoch is enjoying the fact that he has been willing to play with political leaders in the way that the senior executives of the other papers have not,” Straw said.

Straw was testifying before Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who is investigating whether British politicians and newspaper proprietors traded favours — part of a wide-ranging inquiry into media ethics.

The inquiry, set up after the eruption of a scandal over phone hacking and bribery at Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid, has heard evidence of frequent meetings and discreet dinners at which top politicians and senior Murdoch executives talked business.

But Murdoch and several senior lieutenants have repeatedly denied asking for favours, either explicit or implied, when weighing which political party or candidate to support.

Straw, a senior member of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, also spent time describing his relationship to Murdoch protegee Rebekah Brooks, who used to run the News of the World.

He said the pair took the train to London together weekly, trading gossip and talking about the issues of the day.

Brooks has since become one of the highest-profile casualties of the phone hacking scandal. She, her husband Charlie, and four aides have been charged with conspiring to conceal evidence from officials investigating allegations of wrongdoing at the now-defunct tabloid.

All those involved deny the allegations, but the charges raise the prospect of courtroom disclosures that could embarrass Murdoch — who reportedly thought of her as a daughter — and Prime Minister David Cameron, a friend and neighbour of the Brooks’ who often traded text messages with Rebekah and went horse riding with Charlie.

Dagenham is an industrial suburb east of London, hard-hit by the decline of manufacturing in the United Kingdom. It was the site of a Question Time program on BBC, where I occupied a chair hoping that I wouldn’t get asked too many questions about the British educational system.

Question Time is staged in shifting venues across the United Kingdom in front of a studio audience, presumably representative of local opinion. The issue dividing opinion most intensely is of course yesterday’s one-day strike by public-sector workers -and the underlying issue of reform of public sector pay and pensions.

As best an outsider can tell, the issue is really two issues:

1) The UK public sector is better paid on average than the UK private sector–about 7.5% on average is the most cited figure. Pensions and retirement benefits are especially generous–and are outrunning the ability of the government to pay without forcing cuts elsewhere or else calling for rapidly rising taxes.

2) One crucial reason for the disparity: private sector pay has declined since the slump of 2008, and public sector pay has not (yet) followed it down. Britain was hit hard by the crash of 2008-2009 and has posted an even more feeble recovery than the United States.

The two issues thus unite fiscal and moral questions–not only how benefits commitments are to be financed, but also whether the public sector should be protected from the pain suffered by the private sector. British public sector unionists make a claim that would seem recklessly audacious to their American counterparts. They suggest that the public sector should provide a model for the private sector, act even as kind of a leading edge of the British labor market. It’s possible that the recent Labour government inwardly accepted this view.

Labour supported a large expansion of public sector employment, up 16% between 2000 and 2010.

But the real clue to what was going on comes when you disaggregate that 16% figure by region. In the 2000s, Britain benefited from a financial services boom headquartered in south and east Britain. For the rest of the country, however, the Tony Blair years were not times of prosperity. In those regions, the heartland of the Labour party, the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown governments substituted public-sector employment for private sector job creation.

During the finance-led prosperity boom of the last decade, the previous Labour government helped recovery and regeneration in the older industrial regions of North of England, Scotland and Wales, in part by re-distributing tax revenues from London and the Greater South East, in the form of increased levels of public sector employment. As a result, in many of these localities, net job creation has largely been state-sponsored, with private sector activity also, to some degree, dependent on public sector contracts. Accordingly, many parts of the country have become strongly reliant on redistributed state funds and thus will be hugely vulnerable to any planned cuts.

In parts of the North East, for example, close to half of all employment is in the public services sector. …. Tyne and Wear, Merseyside and Humberside are all highly dependent on the state as a significant source of employment.

Now the reckoning has come.

National Post

Columnist and author David Frum is editor of FrumForum.com, where this originally appeared

KUALA LUMPUR — Former U.S. President George W. Bush and British ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair have been found guilty at a mock tribunal in Malaysia for committing “crimes against peace” during the Iraq war.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, part of an initiative by former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad — a fierce critic of the Iraq war — found the former leaders guilty Tuesday after a four-day hearing.

“The Tribunal deliberated over the case and decided unanimously that the first accused George Bush and second accused Blair have been found guilty of crimes against peace,” the tribunal said in a statement.

Related

“Unlawful use of force threatens the world to return to a state of lawlessness. The acts of the accused were unlawful.”

AFP PHOTO/Luke FRAZZA/fileUS President George W. Bush (L) walks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair (R) and Bush's dog Spot 23 February 2001 at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland

Mahathir, who stepped down in 2003 after 22 years in power, unveiled plans for the tribunal in 2007 just before he condemned Bush and Blair as “child killers” and “war criminals” at the launch of an annual anti-war conference.

A seven-member panel chaired by former Malaysian Federal Court judge Abdul Kadir Sulaiman presided over the trial, which began last Saturday, and both Bush and Blair were tried in absentia.

“The evidence showed that the drums of wars were being beaten long before the invasion. The accused in their own memoirs have admitted their own intention to invade Iraq regardless of international law,” it said.

The verdict is purely symbolic as the tribunal has no enforcement powers.

The tribunal is also expected to later hear torture and war crimes charges against seven others, including former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice-President Dick Cheney.

MISRATA, Libya — Muammar Gaddafi’s body lay in an old meat store on Friday as arguments over a burial, and his killing after being captured, dogged efforts by Libya’s new leaders to make a formal start on a new era of democracy.

With a bullet wound visible through the familiar curly hair, the corpse seen by Reuters in Misrata bore other marks of the violent end to a violent life, still being broadcast to the world a day later on looping snatches of gory cellphone video.

The interim prime minister offered a tale of “crossfire” to explain the fallen strongman’s death after he was dragged, still alive, from a storm drain in his home town of Sirte. But seeing him being beaten, while demanding legal rights, to the sound of gunfire, many assume he was simply summarily shot.

Gaddafi’s wife, who found refuge in neighbouring Algeria while her husband and several sons kept their word to fight to the death, was reported to have demanded an inquiry from the United Nations. The U.N. human rights arm said one was merited.

Controversy over the final moments of a man who once held the world in thrall with a mixture of eccentricity and thuggery raised questions about the ability of Libya’s National Transitional Council to control the men with guns, and disquiet among Western allies about respect for human rights among those who claimed to be fighting for just those ideals.

The body appeared to be the latest object of wrangling among the factions of fighters who overthrew him — along with control of weapons, of ministries and of Libya’s oil wealth.

Libyans, and the Western allies who backed the revolt that ended Gaddafi’s 42-year rule two months ago, have indicated their impatience to begin what the United States declared was a democratic “new era.” NATO was expected to agree on Friday to start winding down its seven-month air campaign over Libya.

But regional and other rivalries have been holding up the disposal of the corpse of Gaddafi, who was seized by fighters on Thursday, and a formal declaration of Libya’s “liberation.”

BURIAL DISPUTE

“They are not agreeing on the place of burial. Under Islam he should have been buried quickly but they have to reach an agreement whether he is to be buried in Misrata, Sirte, or somewhere else,” one senior NTC official told Reuters.

Others said talks were under way with members of Gaddafi’s tribe to dispose of him in secret, avoiding creating a shrine.

In Misrata, a local commander, Addul-Salam Eleiwa, showed off the body, torso bare, on a mattress inside a metal-lined cold-store by a market. He said: “He will get his rights, like any Muslim. His body will be washed and treated with dignity. I expect he will be buried in a Muslim cemetery within 24 hours.”

But amid the rumour and counter-rumour swirling between Sirte, Gaddafi’s last bastion, and Misrata, whose siege at his hands made it a symbol of resistance, nothing was certain.

Interim oil minister Ali Tarhouni said he urged colleagues to hold off burying Gaddafi for several days. Dozens of people, many with cellphone cameras, filed in to see that he was dead.

“There’s something in our hearts we want to get out,” said Abdullah al-Suweisi, 30, as he waited. “It is the injustice of 40 years. There is hatred inside. We want to see him.”

In a small triumph for those who were inspired by Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere to launch the rebellion in February in Benghazi, the eastern city was chosen as the venue for NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil to announce that the whole country was liberated. But the planned announcement was delayed from Saturday to Sunday.

That will set a clock ticking on a tentative timetable for a transitional government and for drafting a constitution, under which full elections would, Libyans hope, take place within a year or two.

There has been tension between the easterners and leaders from Misrata, Tripoli and other western cities, who take credit for overrunning the capital in August and complain they are under-represented in an interim government which has yet to move fully to Tripoli. Under the post-liberation plan, that is supposed to happen within weeks, though some in Benghazi, home to much of the oil industry, are keen to decentralise power.

RISKS OF DIVISION

As shown by the delay over burying Gaddafi, differences of opinion in a country that spent 42 years obeying the whims of one man take time to work out — time that worries some observers in light of the heavy weaponry that abounds in Libya.

The uncertain whereabouts of Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son and heir-apparent, believed by NTC officials to have escaped from besieged Sirte and be heading for a southern border, may also distract from the process of switching from war to peace.

And without the glue of hatred for Gaddafi and his clan, some fear a descent into the kind of strife that bedevils Iraq after Saddam Hussein, even if Libya lacks its sectarian divide. Optimists point to how, in two months of controlling Tripoli, the Libyan factions have argued but, so far, not fought.

“Can an inclusive, effective national government be formed? Yes, if factions can avoid fighting,” Jon Marks, chairman of Britain’s Cross Border Information consultancy said. “So it’s all about the politics, and the $64,000 question is whether the new polity can retain the overall consensual feel you had during the revolution, or whether dangerous splits will occur.”

Long-standing regional rivalries in a country only put together under Italian colonial rule in the 1930s are part of a complex of tribal, ethnic and other divisions which Gaddafi exploited at times to control the thinly populated country of six million and its substantial oil and gas resources.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received first news of Gaddafi’s capture in a phone message. “Wow,” she exclaimed, looking into a phone handed to her by an aide in Kabul.

Speaking in Islamabad on Friday, Clinton said Gaddafi’s death marked the start of a “new era” for the Libyan people.

Nabil Elaraby, chief of the Arab League which in March had given NATO actions a regional seal of approval, called for unity: Libyans should “overcome the wounds of the past, look towards the future away from sentiments of hatred and revenge.”

China echoed calls for unity. It said there was a need for “an inclusive political process.”

OIL INTERESTS

Russia, which like China was cool to NATO’s help for the rebels, may share its concern for investments after a senior Libyan oil official said representatives of Moscow’s Gazprom had been summoned to Tripoli to explain what he called breaches of commitments made in contracts it signed under Gaddafi.

Companies from France and Britain, which drove the initial Western support for the rebellion, hope that will stand them in good stead as Libya’s new leaders start allocating new deals.

Among those disappointed by his death were advocates of the International Criminal Court, which had hoped to try him for crimes against humanity, and relatives of those who died in the Lockerbie airliner bombing, still looking for answers more than two decades after a presumed Libyan bomb downed the jumbo jet.

“Investigating whether or not his death was a war crime might be unpopular,” Amnesty International’s Claudio Cordone said. “However, the NTC must apply the same standards to all, affording justice even to those who categorically denied it to others. Bringing Gaddafi to trial would have finally given his numerous victims answers as to why they were targeted and an opportunity for justice and reparations.“

GORY END

As his gory end invigorated new protests in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has tried to crush protests against his family’s similarly lengthy monopoly on power, the precise circumstances of his death remained unclear.

Looking dazed with blood streaming down his face, Gaddafi can be heard in one video saying ”God forbids this“.

”This is for Misrata you dog,“ said one man hitting him.

”Do you know right from wrong?“ Gaddafi says.

”Shut up you dog,“ someone replies as more blows rain down.

”Keep him alive, keep him alive!“ someone shouts.

Interviews conducted separately with those who say they were present offer a picture Gaddafi’s final hours, and with the video footage, give clues about his last stand and demise.

”He called us rats, but look where we found him,“ said Ahmed al-Sahati, a 27-year-old fighter, standing next to two stinking drainage pipes under a six-lane highway near Sirte.

Elsewhere trucks and cars, probably from among a convoy of about 75 targeted by French NATO jets, lay burnt out. Many of their occupants sat charred inside, others, dozens of them, strewn dead across nearby fields as the diehards who had held out in Sirte for weeks raced for a getaway in all directions.

Government fighter Saleem Bakeer recounted to Reuters a version of Gaddafi’s capture that was corroborated by others, including one man who had what he said was Gaddafi’s golden pistol: ”At first we fired at them with anti-aircraft guns, but it was no use,“ said Bakeer, being feted by comrades near the road and the drainage pipes. ”Then we went in on foot.“

After confronting pro-Gaddafi gunmen who said their ”master“ was wounded and inside, he went on: ”We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying ’what’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’.“ He said Gaddafi was then put in a vehicle.

Mahmoud Hamada, a fighter clearly recognisable from the films as being present at the time, said Gaddafi was already barely able to walk but alive when put into an ambulance.

The doubts befitted a man who retained an aura of mystery in the desert as he tormented Western powers by sponsoring bomb-makers from the IRA to the PLO then later embraced Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi in return for investment in Libya’s oil and gas fields.

Some NTC officials insisted the fighters had tried to get Gaddafi to hospital but he was hit in crossfire. But another, speaking to Reuters anonymously, said simply: ”They beat him very harshly and then they killed him. This is a war.“

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/gaddafi-divides-libya-even-in-death/feed5stdThe body of slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is seen inside a storage freezer in Misrata, as people gather around it, October 21, 2011. Gaddafi will be buried according to Muslim rites within 24 hours, a Libyan commander said on Friday, and the body bore a visible bullet hole in the head.